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[387] MALTHUS WOLLASTON [388]
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[387] MALTHUS
WOLLASTON [388] for Great Americans when it was es tablished in 1900. [387] MALTHUS, Thomas Robert (malt'hus) English economist Born: near Guildford, Surrey, February 13, 1766 Died: Haileybury, Somersetshire December 23, 1834 Malthus’ father, a man of property, was a product of the Age of Reason and believed in the goodness of man and in his progress toward an ideal society. Malthus, as an undergraduate at Cam bridge (from which he graduated in 1788), observed England’s population beginning to increase rapidly with the onset of the Industrial Revolution and was less optimistic. He believed that progress toward a better society was im possible because of the rapid increase in human numbers that invariably accom panied such progress. His father, hearing his argument, urged him to put his theories into writ ing. In 1798, after he had been ordained in the Church of England (despite the handicap of a cleft palate that interfered with his speech), Malthus published his Essay on Population anonymously. He maintained that population would always outrun the food supply and that in the end human numbers would have to be kept down by famine, disease, or war. This was an idea that had been earlier mentioned by Franklin [272]. Malthus was greeted with a storm of abuse and published a second and en larged edition in 1803. In the second edi tion he admitted that moral restraint (delayed marriage and sexual con tinence) might counter the increase in population. In 1805 he received a profes sorial appointment in political economy at East India Company’s College at Hai leybury (the first professor of this sub ject in England) and wrote books on this subject that stirred up far less contro versy. He first formulated what is called the law of diminishing returns, for in stance.
Malthus was one of the first to attempt a systematic study of human society; he was a pioneer sociologist, in other words. More specifically, his book inspired both Darwin [554] and Wallace [643] to a working out of the theory of evolution by natural selection, a theory that would undoubtedly have appalled Malthus. [388] WOLLASTON, William Hyde (wool'us-tun) English chemist and physicist
August 6, 1766 Died: London, December 22, 1828
Wollaston was the son of a clergyman and one of seventeen children. He stud ied languages at Cambridge, then switched to medicine and obtained his medical degree in 1793. After seven years of practice as a physician, how ever, deteriorating eyesight led him to re tire and devote himself to research. In particular he dedicated himself to platinum, in connection with which he worked for a while as Tennant’s [375] assistant. Platinum was the glamour metal of the late eighteenth century, heavier, rarer, and more inert than gold. Only in beauty did it fall short. Wollaston developed a method for working plati num, allowing it to be hammered and molded into shape for laboratory ap paratus. He kept his method secret (no one was ever allowed in his laboratory) and earned a fortune of thirty thousand pounds, enough money to make himself financially independent and to make his early retirement possible. He arranged to have a description of the method pub lished after his death. In working with platinum he isolated from its ores two platinum-like metals in 1804. One of these he named palladium after the planetoid Pallas, just discovered by Olbers [372], thus continuing Klap roth’s [335] device of naming a new metal after a new planet. The other he named rhodium (from the Greek for rose) after the rose color of some of its compounds. In 1810 he discovered cys 257 [388] WOLLASTON WOLLASTON
tine (from the Greek word for bladder) in a bladder stone. It was the second of the amino acid building blocks of protein to be discovered, though its identification as such was not to come for nearly a century. His successes bore the fruit of fame as well as wealth. In 1793 he was elected to membership in the Royal Society with Cavendish [307] and William Herschel [321] as his sponsors. In 1806 he was made secretary of the Society and in 1820, when Banks [331], the long-time president, died, it was expected that Wollaston would succeed. At least, it was known that Banks had wanted Wollaston to be his successor. Wollaston, however, stepped back modestly in favor of his good friend Davy [421]. Nor was it only in chemistry that Wollaston left his mark. He invented a goniometer, a device to measure the an gles between crystal faces, which greatly advanced mineralogical research. In fact, by using it, he was able to correct points concerning which Haiiy [332] had been in error. A calcium silicate mineral is named wollastonite in his honor. In his will he bequeathed the interest on £1,000 as an annual award (the Wollaston medal) for researches into the mineral structure of the earth. He also introduced the chemical concept of “equivalent weight.” Wollaston was a superb experi mentalist and technician but he often did not go far enough and scored several im portant near misses. He was interested in the discovery of Oersted [417] that an electric current produced a magnetic field and he tried to bring about the reverse, having a magnet produce an electric current. He failed, but the notion was a good one. He discussed the matter with Humphry Davy [421]. Davy’s assis tant, Michael Faraday [474], who was also present and was thus introduced to the subject, succeeded where Wollaston had failed. That success was to have the greatest consequence. In studying the spectrum, Wollaston was one of the first to observe ultraviolet light, though here the credit is usually given to the more thorough research of Ritter [413]. More important, Wollaston in 1802 was the first to note that dark lines crossed the spectrum, an observa tion that Newton [231] had unaccounta bly missed. To Wollaston, however, it seemed that they were merely the natu ral boundaries between the various colors of the spectrum and he let the matter rest, a classic example of a missed opportunity. Fraunhofer [450] was to carry it further a dozen years later, and a half century after Wollas ton’s death those lines were to roll back the curtains of the heavens even more astonishingly than the telescope had done. Wollaston foresaw the necessity of considering molecular structure in three dimensions but left it at that. It was Van’t Hoff [829] three quarters of a cen tury later who developed that notion properly. In 1809 Wollaston was responsible for a piece of deplorable confusion. He an alyzed a mineral in which Hatchett [383] had claimed to have found a new metal, columbium. Wollaston denied this and his greater authority carried the day. But Wollaston was wrong and the error was not righted for a generation. Even more unfortunate was the fact that he was a strong force against British adoption of a decimal system of weights and measures. The royal commission of which he was a member submitted its disapproving report in 1819, and as a re sult Great Britain and the United States as well (for it followed Britain’s lead) have been infinitely hampered for gener ations through use of the irrational En glish, or common, systems of weights and measures. (Britain and the Common wealth of Nations have in recent years made the switch to the metric system, but the United States blindly holds out.) Wollaston could also stand firmly on the side of what we now believe to be right. He supported Young’s [402] wave theory of light, an unpopular stand in England, and withstood the abuse this brought down upon his head. Though Wollaston was generous to a fault, he was, like Cavendish, cold, with drawn, unsociable, and interested only in his work. He died of a brain tumor. 258 [389] DALTON
DALTON [389] [389] DALTON, John English chemist
about September 6, 1766 Died: Manchester, July 27, 1844 Dalton, the son of a weaver, came of a Quaker family and was a practicing Quaker all of his life. As Quakers, his parents did not register the boy’s birth, and the day of that birth is uncertain, being given by the perhaps fallible mem ories of neighbors. Dalton left school at the age of eleven and a year later, in 1778, at the age of twelve he returned to begin teaching at a Quaker school. This had its difficulties, for some of his pupils were as old as he was and presented disciplinary problems. However, it was there that he grew inter ested in science. His first love was meteorology and, be ginning in 1787, he studied the weather with instruments he built himself. In 1793 he wrote a book on the subject, Meteorological Observations and Essays, which qualifies him as one of the pio neers in meteorology. Though he passed on to chemistry, he never abandoned meteorology, keeping careful daily records of the weather for fifty-seven years alto gether, to the day he died. (Benjamin Franklin [272] had also kept a “weather diary.”) He recorded some two hundred thousand observations. It is not surpris ing that, as he always maintained, he could never find time for marriage. He was the first to describe color blindness, in a publication in 1794. He was color-blind himself and the condi tion is sometimes called daltonism. Color blindness is not exactly an advantage to a chemist, who must be able to see color changes when he works with chemicals. Perhaps that was one reason why Dalton was a rather clumsy and slipshod experi menter.
Dalton was a poor speaker and could not make money by lecturing in a day when such things were the rage. How ever, it is upon neither fine talk nor ex periments that his fame rests but upon his successful interpretation, beginning about 1800, of a century and a half of the experimentation and fine talk of others. His meteorological observations led Dalton to study the composition of the air and from that it was but a step to thinking about the properties of gases. In considering those properties, beginning with the experiments of Boyle [212], Dalton could not help supposing that gases were made up of tiny particles, as other scientists, including Boyle himself and Newton [231], had believed. (In fact, Dalton contributed to the theory of gases by promulgating what is now known as Dalton’s law of partial pres sures in 1801. This states that each com ponent of a mixture of gases exerts the same pressure that it would if it alone occupied the whole volume of the mix ture, at the same temperature. He was also the first to measure the rise in tem perature of air when it was compressed and to show that the amount of water vapor the air could hold rose with tem perature.) But Dalton went on to consider that
sist of these small particles. The law of definite proportions as enunciated by Proust [364] in 1788 made it appear that a compound might contain two elements in the ratio of 4 to 1, perhaps, but never 4.1 to 1 or 3.9 to 1. This could easily be explained by supposing that each ele ment was made up of indivisible parti cles. If the particle of one element weighed four times the weight of a parti cle of the other, and the compound was formed by uniting a particle of one with a particle of the other, the ratio by weight would always be 4 to 1 and never 4.1 to 1 or 3.9 to 1. Sometimes elements might combine in different proportions to produce different compounds, but then each compound obeys the law of definite proportions, and the two compounds are closely re lated in this respect. This can best be ex plained by an example. Carbon dioxide is made up of carbon and oxygen in pro portions by weight of 3 to 8. The com pound carbon monoxide is made up ot carbon and oxygen in proportions by weight of 3 to 4. Carbon dioxide has just twice the proportion of oxygen that car
[389] DALTON
DALTON [389] bon monoxide has. Dalton found such cases in connection with methane (car bon .'hydrogen = 3:1) and ethylene (carbon:hydrogen = 6:1) and with various oxides of nitrogen. Examples like this illustrate the law of multiple proportions, first clearly enun ciated by Dalton in 1803. It seemed to Dalton that carbon monoxide might be composed of one particle of carbon united with one particle of oxygen (where the oxygen particle was four thirds as heavy as the carbon particle) while carbon dioxide was composed of a particle of carbon combined with two oxygen particles. (He was later proved correct. ) Dalton recognized the similarity of this theory to that advanced by Democ ritus [20] twenty-one centuries earlier and therefore called these tiny particles by Democritus’ own term, “atoms.” However, Democritus’ notions had been pure deduction, pure speculation, and designed to fill out some grand scheme of the universe. Dalton’s notions, on the other hand, were based on a cen tury and a half of chemical experi mentation and were designed only to or ganize and explain a specific set of ob servations. Dalton’s theory was a chemi cal theory and not a philosophical one. Dalton held that all elements were composed of extremely tiny, indivisible, and indestructible atoms and that all the substances we know are composed of combinations of these atoms. One sub stance could be turned into another by breaking up a particular combination and forming a new one. All the atoms of one element, Dalton held, were exactly alike, but the atoms of each element were different from the atoms of every other. This sounds very much like Democ ritus, but then Dalton veered off from the speculations of all other atomists. He maintained that atoms differed from each other only in mass. This was some thing that could be measured and so Dalton was the first to advance a quanti tative atomic theory. It was a wedding of Democritus and Lavoisier [334]. From the proportions by weight of the elements in particular compounds Dalton even tried to work out the relative weights of the different atoms. He was the first to prepare a table of atomic weights.
Thus, since water was made up of eight parts of oxygen to one part of hy drogen (by weight) and assuming that water contained one oxygen atom for every hydrogen atom, it is necessary to conclude that the atomic weight of oxy gen is eight times that of hydrogen. If the atomic weight of hydrogen is arbi trarily set at 1, then the atomic weight of oxygen is 8. (Dalton was wrong. Water contains two atoms of hydrogen for every atom of oxygen so that the individ ual oxygen atom is eight times as heavy as two hydrogen atoms or sixteen times as heavy as a single hydrogen atom. However, his principle was correct.) Nowadays a rarely used name for the measure of atomic weight is the dalton. It is just one-sixteenth the mass of the oxygen atom, which therefore weighs 16 daltons. Dalton first advanced his atomic no tions in 1803, and in 1808 he published a book, New System of Chemical Philos ophy, in which he spelled out his theories in detail. Once explained, Dalton’s atomism was so inevitable that it was accepted by most chemists with surprisingly little op position, considering its revolutionary nature. Wollaston [388] accepted it at once. Davy [421] held out bitterly for a few years (out of jealousy, most likely, for poor Davy suffered agonies from that disease) but then came round. Dalton, like a good Quaker, responded to all crit icism gently, speaking highly of Davy at all times. Opposition didn’t die down for a century, however, for Ostwald [840] objected to atoms well into the twentieth century. However, in general, one might say that chemistry became atomist with Dalton and has remained atomist. Dalton’s Quaker beliefs led him to shun any form of glory. He refused to let Davy nominate him for membership in the Royal Society in 1810, and he had to be quietly elected in 1822 without his knowledge. As the importance of the
[390] HISINGER
BOUVARD [392] atomic theory came to be appreciated more and more, further honors from for eign scientific societies broke upon his quiet Quaker simplicity. Distinguished foreign chemists, such as Pelletier [454], came to Manchester to see him, and when he visited Paris, Laplace [347] and Humboldt [397] were eager to greet and lionize him. In 1831 he helped found the British Association for the Advancement of Sci ence. In 1832, when he received a doc tor’s degree from Oxford, the opportu nity was seized to present him to King William IV. He had resisted such a pre sentation because he would not wear court dress, but Oxford robes were sufficient. The only trouble was that the Oxford robes were scarlet and a Quaker could not wear scarlet. Fortunately Dal ton’s color blindness came to his rescue. He calmly announced that he could see no scarlet. He received his degree and was presented to the king in scarlet, which he saw as gray. In 1833 he re ceived a £150 annual pension from the king, a pension that was doubled in 1836. When he died and was helpless to pre vent it, his funeral was turned into an elaborate and giant tribute to him. Dalton’s records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World Wax II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war. [390] HISINGER, Wilhelm (hee'sing-er) Swedish mineralogist Born: Skinnskatteberg, Vastman- land, December 23, 1766 Died: Skinnskatteberg, June 28, 1852
Hisinger, the son of a wealthy iron works owner, was bom Hising, but adopted the ending after he was en nobled. He came of a wealthy family and was interested in mineralogy as a hobby. He befriended and supported the young Berzelius [425], and the mineral in which the two discovered cerium was from Hisinger’s own estate. [391] EKEBERG, Anders Gustaf (a/- kuh-berg) Swedish chemist Born: Stockholm, January 15, 1767
Died: Uppsala, February 11, 1813 Ekeberg graduated from the Univer sity of Uppsala in 1788, and after travel ing through Germany returned to Upp sala where in 1794 he began teaching chemistry. He helped introduce Lavoi sier’s [334] new chemistry to Sweden but was rather badly treated by the science in return, for an exploding flask in 1801 blinded him in one eye. He was also partly deaf as a result of an infection in childhood. However, neither handicap affected hand or brain. In 1802 he began the analysis of min erals from Finland and from that won derland of mineralogy, Ytterby, where Gadolin [373] had found his rare earth. He located a new metal, one that was not a rare earth, and named it tantalum because, according to one suggestion, it had been such a tantalizing task to track down. According to another, he named it so because it was resistant to the action of acid and did not dissolve in it though it was surrounded by it, as Tantalus in the Greek myths could not drink though he stood up to his chin in water. In one of his later pieces of research Ekeberg was assisted by the young Berze lius [425], who eventually took Eke- berg’s side in a controversy with Hatch ett [383]. [392] BOUVARD, Alexis (boo-vahrO French astronomer Born: Contamines, Haut Fau- cigny, June 27, 1767 Died: Paris, June 7, 1843 Bouvard was bom into a poor family. When he got to Paris in 1785, he could not afford schooling and was forced to attend free lectures. He was good at mathematics and found employment at the Paris Observatory where Laplace [347] was willing to give him the job of Download 17.33 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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